The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 eBook

of property, but it is, in large measure, a corollary
of property security. Personal rights shape themselves
upon the analogy of property rights; they utilize
the same channels of thought and habit. One of
the most powerful arguments for “social insurance”
is its very name. Insurance is recognized as
an essential to the security of property; it is therefore
easy to make out a case for the application of the
principle to non-propertied claims.

Some may claim that the security of property has now
fulfilled its mission; that we can safely allow the
principle to decay in order to concentrate our attention
upon the task of establishing non-propertied rights.
But let us remember that we are not removed from barbarism
by the length of a universe. The crust of orderly
civilization is deep under our feet: but not
six hundred years deep. The primitive fires still
smoke on our Mexican borders and in the Balkans.
And blow holes open from time to time through our
own seemingly solid crust—­in Colorado, in
West Virginia, in the Copper Country. It is evidently
premature to affirm that the security of property
has fulfilled its mission.

IX

The question at issue, is not, however, the rights
of property against the rights of man—­or
more honestly—­the rights of labor.
The claims of labor upon the social income may advance
at the expense of the claims of property. In
the institutional struggle between the propertied and
the propertyless, the sympathies of the writer are
with the latter party. It is his hope and belief
that an ever increasing share of the social income
will assume the form of rewards for personal effort.

But this is an altogether different matter from the
crushing of one private property interest after another,
in the name of the social welfare or the social morality.
Such detailed attacks upon property interests are,
in the end, to the injury of both social classes.
Frequently they amount to little more than a large
loss to one property interest, and a small gain to
another. They increase the element of insecurity
in all forms of property; for who shall say which
form is immune from attack? Now it is the slum
tenement, obvious corollary of our social inequalities;
next it may be the marble mansion or gilded hotel,
equally obvious corollaries of the same institutional
situation. Now it is the storage of meat that
is under attack; it may next be the storage of flour.
The fact is, our mass of income yielding possessions
is essentially an organic whole. The irreproachable
incomes are not exactly what they would be if those
subject to reproach did not exist. If some property
incomes are dirty, all property incomes become turbid.